December is a time when we celebrate light piercing through the darkness. In the winter we experience more lightless hours. And December is the time when the counting of days ends and begins, like the moment a tide reverses, rolling back to sea.

Christmas celebrates Jesus’ birth, announced by the brightest star in the sky. The star oriented the wise men. It literally oriented them to the manger and symbolically orients the world to a new way of seeing—a new guiding light. We learn to recognize that we are connected to and have an impact on each other in every small gesture.

Chanukah is also a festival of lights. The light in this story is the miracle of a lamp with a tiny supply of oil lasting eight nights. Like the lamp, our daily lives leave us feeling as if we’ve exhausted our last reservoir. We learn to expand the resources deep within us and muster strength to see us through personal darkness despite improbable odds.

Animals instinctually know how to prepare for winter. Bears find caves to hibernate. Chipmunks burrow in holes underground. Even termites close off air tubes in their complex sand structures. What do we do? Besides upping the thermostat and wrapping our necks with woolen scarves, we also soak in light to store in our inner selves. We seek out the guiding star to navigate our lives, or we reach deeply within.

Light has other strange properties. Our eyes perceive a stream of light but when we reach out, we cannot touch it. We see light only when it touches other things like reflections on the moon or specks of dust in the air seen from the light of a movie projector in a dark room. We live in a time of many kinds of light. Campfires, torches, whale oil and kerosene lamps from days of old are now new kinds of light—laser, electrical, nuclear, incandescent or fluorescent, sulfur lamps or neon lights.

What takes us out of darkness physically? What illuminates spiritually? Light is the beam that reveals what it lands on. It fills the air but we see its effects, what it lands on becomes aware to our eyes or our technology sensors. Like enlightenment, like love, like peace, we sense it when it lands on us.

This is the season to notice where the light lands. This is the season to be a source of light.

Technology's New Lens

We often don’t realize how much technology shapes our daily lives. A few decades ago, a cell phone was something out of Star Trek. But now new technologies seem less and less like science fiction and more like essential parts of our world. What we don’t realize is how much this can affect our perception.

For example, the new Nokia 8 allows you to take a picture of what is in front of you as it also records you and what is behind you. This is called a “Bothie” now adding to selfies, allowing people to take pictures forward and backwards simultaneously. The concept is simple—two lenses. But it blows open our habit of perception. Will we start to perceive like the proverbial teacher with eyes in the back of her head?

3-D printing is another way of seeing in new ways. It incorporates a full-sphere visual of the object being replicated. The blueprint of a hand tool can be sent to the International Space Station, where a 3-D printer creates the tool for astronauts to use. This cuts down on payloads launched and allows for devices to be created as they are needed. But it wouldn’t be possible without the technology that allows us to see in multiple dimensions. Inside the space station, astronauts float and summersault to move about. They tether themselves to a spot with a foot latch to anchor themselves to a place on the cylinder-shaped interior walls. Without gravity, our way of seeing the world changes. When the first crew left earth they were astounded by the sight of our Earth from outer space, it allowed them to see our world in new ways.

Even healthcare is rearranging. Robotic assists during medical surgery become a 360-degree eye that can image the space around and under the bones, nerves, tissues, muscles, and organs being operated on.

These new ways of recording, seeing, moving, working upend our basic assumptions. We can feel unmoored, as dizzyingly adrift as an astronaut floating in space. The ability to see all around us at once will be an acquired perception, much like a blind person suddenly given sight needs to learn to distinguish the depth of fields, the outline of forms. Add virtual reality to these multiple lenses, and the job of making sense out of what is real or imagined, what is forward or back, or what is in around the corner, requires a major adjustment in our senses and how we make sense of the world. The question is: What will you do with this new sight?